The South African photographer Gideon Mendel is interested in the submerged worlds of today. He made portraits of the victims of the flooding devastation and, at the center, found pearls.
For almost ten years, Gideon Mendel traveled the globe to immortalize the peril of one natural catastrophe: flooding that ravages homes and inhabitants. He went to Pakistan and Nigeria, as well as Haiti, and even France in 2016, when flooding not seen for close to one hundred years struck the Île-de-France.
“I make this work because I’ve been panicked by global warming since I was a child,” confides Gideon Mendel. “Before, when I was a kid, I was worried about the extinction of polar bears, but now I would like to show that climate change is not only on the other side of the world, but also at our doors.”
Mud
The devastated dare pose for their portraits in front of what is usually the most precious to them: their home. There is an English couple with their feet in the water, waders up to their sweaters, and, behind them, their house completely inundated. A Brazilian woman mimes her ordinary life, smoking a cigarette in her lounge chair on the porch of her house, but water covers the lounge chair… There are perhaps even more troubling portraits yet, like the mud in which two Haitians are wading, in what seems to be the living room of their home.
These images could be indecent if Gideon Mendel hadn’t found a pearl in the middle of this disaster. The photographer picked up family pictures of those who had been devastated by the flood, that he sometimes found in the wreckage.Taking pictures of the photographs, he gives a face to these individuals’ psychological wounds, to the anonymous victims of a cataclysm.
The Poison of Devastation
But he goes even farther. It reminds us that family pictures are sometimes more precious, than any material goods, even one’s own home. In these photographs damaged by floodwaters, impossible figures are seen. Swollen faces without eyes, sometimes without mouths. Faces damaged by water. One could perhaps imagine that this water is from the tears of all these victims . The flooding is of no matter, because what is shown in Gideon Mendel’s work is that the important thing is not the devastation of such damage, but the social consequences that plague the victims.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, author, and director who lives and works in Paris.
Gideon Mendel, Drowning World
Festival des Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles 2017
From July 3 through September 24, 2017
Arles, France
